To-Do List: Remembering Nora Ephron; Rangel and Hatch Win

To know: The writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron died Tuesday of pneumonia; she was seventy-one (read Ariel Levy’s remembrance of her, and a selection of the pieces she wrote for The New Yorker over the years) … Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has declared a state of war in his country … Congressman Charlie Rangel, Democrat of New York, and Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, both survived primary challenges … Thirty-two thousand Colorado residents have been displaced by wildfires there … A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Obama ahead of Romney in key swing states … “The Avengers” became the third movie ever to cross the six-hundred-million-dollar mark at the domestic box office.

Last Wednesday, BuzzFeed’s Jack Shepherd published an irresistible piece called, “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” The post is exactly as advertised, a rundown of photos of people being more wonderful than you’d expect—rescuing animals from danger, helping strangers in need, expressing tolerance for others, and all manner of additional good stuff. It became an instant hit on Reddit, Twitter, and especially Facebook, where it has earned more than 2 million Likes. So far, the post has attracted more than 7 million views, and as of Tuesday morning, its traffic shows no sign of abating.

When I saw Shepherd’s piece, my first thought was, Why didn’t I think of that? It’s a question that often pulls at me when I point my browser to BuzzFeed, which I do many times a day. Like a modern-day, unstuffy Reader’s Digest, BuzzFeed has a knack for distilling the good and the bad of life on the Internet into short, fun, highly clickable vignettes.

How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret?

The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell, deliberately—their posts are hard to trace back to the original source material.

In the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells on the disappointing economic realities of the Obama Administration:

When Obama was elected in 2008, many progressives looked forward to a replay of the New Deal. The economic situation was, after all, strikingly similar. As in the 1930s, a runaway financial system had led first to excessive private debt, then financial crisis; the slump that followed (and that persists to this day), while not as severe as the Great Depression, bears an obvious family resemblance. So why shouldn’t policy and politics follow a similar script?

But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935.